Lycan: Presentation
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Pitch:
In a uchronic version of 1950’s USA, you play as Connor, a young half-lycan, tracked down by both humans and lycans, he has to learn how to use his powers, to discover who he is and who to be.
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Theme: Uchronia
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Genre: Action-RPG
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Camera: Third Person
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Platform: PC with keyboard and mouse or gamepad
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Project Type: Personal Team Project
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Team: 3 Game Designers and 1 Game Artist
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Software: Unreal Engine
Context
Initially created for a screenplay assignment by Alban Hyvert, Nathanaël Dussaud, and myself, we decided in November 2019 to make it a real game and started to conceptualize it. Later, we recruited Urszula Gorak as a Character Artist to help us created this prototype.
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The prototype is currently on hold but will be continued once the team finds the time between each other schedules.
What I've done:
As a Narrative Designer
Starting with the draft script we wrote in First Year to develop the universe that was originally intended to take place in the near future, I decided to turn it into a uchronia in order to challenge my narrative design skills.
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I then chose 1870 as the revelation date of the lycan people so that our game would take place in 1950, just far enough away to have suffered world wars and so that lycans would not be completely a novelty, but just close enough so that some resentment would still remain in the minds.
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Choosing this date, and in order to make a realistic and credible uchronia, I then embarked on research into the past of each of the major countries in 1870, their belief in werewolves in particular, but also which countries had wolves on their territory at that time in order to determine where the lycans would live.
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Thus, thanks to all his research, I was able to create a slide show explaining the universe in which Lycan's characters will evolve:
Then I started writing character sheets of every important character, detailing their personality, their motivation, their relations, and their past as credible and coherent as possible to the universe I had established:
With the universe and characters now in place, I began writing a walkthrough summarizing Connor's actions throughout this world. The story of the game being with choice, the walkthrough written below is the most neutral part of the story possible:
In order to show my abilities to write and integrate choice dialogs through a dialog tree in Unreal Engine 5, I made myself a small scene in the engine, taken from the beginning of Chapter 2 of the Walkthrough. You can download the build right here:
How does it work? You just have to move your character to another one or to one of these colored boxes before pressing "F" to open the dialog interface.
With the dialog interface now open, click anywhere on the screen to proceed to the reply choices. Each reply chosen by the player leads to a different response from the NPC.
Dialogue Tree Integration
To achieve this, I watched a tutorial to learn how to create and add an Actor Component to my NPCs and boxes calling the Behaviour Tree which I used as a dialogue tree. In this tree I wrote and integrated all my possible choices of dialogues, going from the simplest like for the boxes to the most complex for Hannibal.
Dialogue Component
Dialog tree of a box.
Dialogue tree of Hannibal
Dialogue Component
What I've done:
as a Game Designer
As a Game Designer, I set up a slideshow explaining the gameplay of Lycan in order to give the team the guideline of our game in order to later make a prototype highlighting some of the mechanics presented in this slideshow:
The Team:
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Game & Narrative Designer
Technical Game Designer
Level Designer
Character Artist